Anna is a security guard in a high-rise building at the edge of the forest. It’s a safe, harmonious place where the tenants are carefully selected by a stringent vetting committee. It’s a self-sustaining utopia, far away from the madness of the big city. One day, a dog disappears, and its owner begins accusing the other tenants in the building, causing quite a stir and a big rift in the community. Anna already has enough on her hands since her daughter, Iris, has locked herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out, and now she has to deal with the creeping paranoia and fear among the tenants that’s very quickly escalating into indecency and absurdity.

Natalia Sinelnikova’s first feature is a little gem. Conveying a subtle social commentary about totalitarian regimes, WE MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD is a real slap in the face about how, regardless of the height of the walls that protect us from the outside world, rampant fear will always bring out the worst in human beings and destabilize a fragile harmony. In the spirit of Lanthimos’s absurd and weird movies, Sinelnikova’s debut is even more remarkable in that it’s her Babelsberg Film University graduation project, and was picked by the Berlinale for its world premiere in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino German cinema section. Natalia Sinelnikova is setting her (first) bar very high, and I can’t wait to see where she goes from here. (ANNICK MAHNERT)

Paired with short GARY SCREAMS FOR YOU Dir. Cody McGlashan, Nolan Sordyl